The Seek Challenges are a great tool for engaging nature novices. I am currently trying to attract nature novices to local parks and encouraging them to seek plants that are known to be there. This involves providing them with a guided tour that they can download to a smartphone and use as they walk the trail. This tour uses a GPS app to show them a trail and contains a few geocoded waypoints that highlight specific species. These waypoints appear on the map and contain descriptions and Web links. This makes it easy for them to find the target species. My next step is to up the ante by creating scavenger hunts for a given park with more species. I can do this by identifying plants myself or using iNaturalist research grade observations. Currently, I download the observations (with their coordinates) from iNaturalist and use them to create a GPS file that others can use on their phones as they walk a trail. This is a tedious process and the end result is not as user-friendly as I would like. Do you have any plans to expand the Seek Challenge function so that users can create their own challenge? Perhaps they would pull in observations from the park. This would be wonderful.
Hi @bblanton - just a quick note that had edited the title to make it an action. Feel free to adjust!
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voted! i love this idea and would absolutely use it. i think it could have a lot of educational value, for classes or by a park to showcase its biodiversity for example. in my opinion it would make the seek app a lot more interesting.
it reminds me a bit of the mysterious “missions” feature that i have never seen as i only use my computer and my iphone
This is something that’s been requested via help@inat, but we have no plans to add create-a-challenge functionality to Seek, I’m sorry. I’m going to close this request.